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Eugine_Nier comments on Welcome to Less Wrong! (5th thread, March 2013) - Less Wrong
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The same is the case for a lot of atheist arguments.
See my comment here.
Yeah, you make a good point when you say that we need "Bayesian evidence", not just the folk kind of "evidence". However, most people don't know what "Bayesian evidence" means, because this is a very specific term that's common on Less Wrong but approximately nowhere else. I don't know a better way to put it, though.
That said, my comment wasn't about different kinds of evidence necessarily. What I would like to hear from a Christian debater is a statement like, "This thing right here ? This is what caused me to become a Reformed Presbilutheran in the first place." If that thing turns out to be something like, "God spoke to me personally and I never questioned the experience" or "I was raised that way and never gave it a second thought", that's fine. What I don't want to do is sit there listening to some new version of the Kalaam Cosmological Argument (or whatever) for no good reason, when even the person advancing the argument doesn't put any stock in it.
I was raised Roman Catholic. I did give it a second thought; I found, through my life, very little evidence against the existence of God, and some slight evidence for the existence of God. (It doesn't communicate well; it's all anecdotal).
I do find, on occasion, that the actions of God are completely mysterious to me. However, an omniscient being would have access to a whole lot of data that I do not have access to; in light of that, I tend to assume that He knows what He is doing.
The existence of God also implies that the universe has some purpose, for which it is optimised. I'm not quite sure what that purpose is; the major purpose of the universe may be something that won't happen for the next ten billion years. However, trying to imagine what the purpose could be is an interesting occasional intellectual exercise.
May I ask what you expected evidence against the existence of God to have looked like?
That is entirely the right question to ask. And the answer is, I don't have the faintest idea.
The question there is, what would a universe without God look like? And that question is one that I can't answer. I'd guess that such a universe, if it were possible, would have more-or-less entirely arbitrary and random natural laws; I'd imagine that it would be unlikely to develop intelligent life; and it would be unlikely for said intelligent life, if it developed, to be able to gather any understanding of the random and arbitrary natural laws at all.
The trouble is, this line of reasoning promptly falls into the same trouble as any other anthropic argument. The fact that I'm here, thinking about it, means that there is intelligent life in this universe. So a universe without intelligent life is counterfactual, right from the start. I knew that when I started constructing the argument; I can't be sure that I'm not constructing an argument that's somehow flawed. It's very easy, when I'm sure of the answer, to create an argument that's more rationalising than rationality; and it can be hard to tell if I'm doing that.
Doesn't this argument Prove Too Much by also showing that without a Metagod, God should be expected to have arbitrary and random governing principles? The universe is ordered, but trying to explain that by appealing to an ordered God begs the question of what sort of ordered Metagod constructed the first one.
I don't think that necessarily follows. A sufficiently intelligent mind (and I think I can assume that if God exists, then He is sufficiently intelligent) can impose self-consistency and order on itself.
This also leads to the possible alternate hypothesis that the universe is, in fact, an intelligent mind in and of itself; that would be pantheism, I think.
Of course, this does not prevent the possibility of a Pebblesorter God, or a Paperclipper God. To find out whether these are the case, we can look at the universe; there certainly don't seem to be enough paperclips around for a Paperclipper God. There might well be a Beetler God, of course; there's plenty of beetles. Or a Planetsorter God, a large-scale variant on the Pebblesorter; as far as we know, all the planets are neatly sorted into groups around stars. Order, by itself, does not necessarily mean an order that we would have to agree with.
This begs Eliezer's question, I think. Intelligence itself is highly non-arbitrary and rule-governed, so by positing that God is sufficiently intelligent (and the bar for sufficiency here is pretty high), you're already sneaking in a bunch of unexplained orderliness. So in this particular case, no, I don't think you can assume that if God exists, then He is sufficiently intelligent, just like I can't respond to your original point by assuming that if the universe exists, then it is orderly.
I disagree. Intelligence makes its own rules once it is there; but the human brain is one of the most arbitrary and hard-to-understand pieces of equipment that we know about. There have been a lot of very smart people trying to build AI for a very long time; if the creation of intelligence were highly non-arbitrary and followed well-known rules, we would have working AI by now.
So, yes; I think that intelligence can arise from arbitrary randomness. I'd go further, and claim that if it can't arise from arbitrary randomness then it can't exist at all; either intelligence arose in the form of God who then created an orderly universe (the theist hypothesis), or an arbitrary universe came into existence with random (and suspiciously orderly) laws that then led to intelligence in the form of humanity (the atheist hypothesis).
Fair enough. Then let me put it this way; if God is not sufficiently intelligent, then God would be unable to create the ordered universe that we see; in this case, an ordered universe would be no more likely than it would be without God. An ordered universe is therefore evidence in favour of the claim that if God exists, then He is sufficiently intelligent to create an ordered universe.
I agree that intelligence itself is an optimizing process (which I presume is what you mean by "making its own rules"), but it is also the product of an optimizing process, natural selection. Your claim that it is arbitrary confuses the map and the territory. Just because we don't fully understand the rules governing the functioning of the brain does not mean it is arbitrary. Maybe it is weak evidence for this claim, but I think that is swamped by the considerable evidence that intelligence is exquisitely optimized for various quite complex purposes (and also that it operates in accord with the orderly laws of nature).
Also, smart people have been able to build AIs (albeit not AGIs), and the procedure for building machines that can perform intelligently at various tasks involves quite a bit of design. We may not know what rules govern our brain, but when we build systems that mimic (and often outperform) aspects of our mental function, we do it by programming rules.
I suspect, though, that we are talking past each other a bit here. I think you're using the words "random" and "arbitrary" in ways with which I am unfamiliar, and, I must confess, seem confused. In what sense is the second horn of your dilemma an "arbitrary universe [coming] into existence with random (and suspiciously orderly) laws"? What does it mean to describe the universe as arbitrary and random while simultaneously acknowledging its orderliness? Do you simply mean "uncaused", because (a) that is not the only alternative to theism, and (b) I don't see why one would expect an uncaused universe (as opposed to a universe picked using a random selection process) not to have orderly laws.
OK, but this doesn't respond to Eliezer's point. If you conditionalize on the existence of (a Christianish) God, then plausibly an intelligent God is more likely than an unintelligent one, given the orderliness of the universe. But Eliezer was contesting your claim that the orderliness of the universe is evidence for the existence of God, while also not being evidence for the existence of a Metagod.
So Eliezer's question is, if P(orderliness | God) > P(orderliness | ~God), then why not also P(intelligent God | Metagod) > P(intelligent God | ~Metagod)? Your response is basically that P(intelligent God | God & orderliness) > P(~intelligent God | God & orderliness). How does this help?
It's not arbitrary in the sense of random. It's arbitrary in the sense of not following obvious apriori principles. It may impose its own higher-order rules, but that is something that happens in a system that already combines order and chaos in a very subtle and hard to duplicate way. Simple, comprehensible order of the kind you detect and admire in the physical unverse at large is easier to do than designing a brain. No one can build an AGI, but physicists build models of physical systems all the time.
Did you mean to say "can not" in that sentence ?
Richard Dawkins does. The universe we see (he says somewhere; this is not a quote) is exactly what a world without God would look like: a world in which, on the whole, to live is to suffer and die for no reason but the pitiless working out of cause and effect, out of which emerged the blind, idiot god of evolution. A billion years of cruelty so vast that mountain ranges are made of the dead. A world beyond the reach of God.
To be fair, this type of argument only eliminates benevolent and powerful gods. It does not screen out actively malicious gods, indifferent gods, or gods who are powerless to do much of anything.
I don't see what's so bad about mountain ranges being made of dead bodies. The creatures that once used those bodies aren't using them anymore - those mere atoms might as well get recycled to new uses. The problem of death is countered by the solution of the afterlife; an omniscient God would know exactly what the afterlife is like, and an omniscient benevolent God could allow death if the afterlife is a good place. (I don't have any proof of the existance of the afterlife at hand, unfortunately).
Suffering, now; suffering is a harder problem to deal with. Which leads around to the question - what is the purpose of the universe? If suffering exists, and God exists, then suffering must have been put into the universe on purpose. For what purpose? A difficult and tricky question.
What I suspect, is that suffering is there for its long-term effects on the human psyche. People exposed to suffering often learn a lot from it, about how to handle emotions; people can form long-term bonds of friendship over a shared suffering, can learn wisdom by dealing with suffering. Yes, some people can shortcut the process, figuring out the lessons without undergoing the lesson; but many people can't.
This is using your brain as an outcome pump. Start with a conclusion to be defended, observations that prima facie blow it out of the water, and generate ideas for holding onto the conclusion regardless. You can do it with anything, and it's an interesting exercise in creative thinking to come up with a defence of propositions such as that the earth is flat, that war is good for humanity, or that you're Jesus. (Also known as retconning.) But it is not a way of arriving at the truth of anything.
What your outcome pump has come up with is:
War really is good for humanity! But what then is the optimal amount of suffering? Just the amount we see? More? Less?
I expect that the answer is that the omniscience and omnibenevolence of God imply that what we see is indeed just the right amount. God is perfect, therefore this is the best of all possible worlds. But that would just be more outcome-pumping. No new data or reasoning is entering the argument: the idea that God has got it just right has been generated by the desired conclusion.
At some point one has to ask, where did that conclusion come from? Why do I believe it so intensely as to make all of the retconning seem sensible? Why indeed? Because earlier you expressed only a lukewarm belief:
I don't see how this is any different with what Richard Dawkins is doing with his claim.
You mean, Dawkins has latched onto atheism for irrational reasons and is generating whatever argument will sustain it, without regard to the evidence?
For anyone who has taken on the mantle of professional atheist, as Dawkins has, there is a danger of falling into that mode of argument. Do you have any reason to think he has in fact fallen?
That may be what I am doing. But sometimes, there are things that really are different to what the prima facie evidence seems to suggest. Heat is not an effect of the transfer of a liquid called phlogiston; the Sun does not go round the Earth; the Sun is bigger than the Earth. Sometimes, there are hidden complexities that change the meaning of some of the evidence.
Ah, an excellent question. I can't be sure, but I expect that the optimal amount of suffering is a good deal less than we see.
This leads to the obvious question; why would a benevolent, omniscient, omnipotent God create a universe with more suffering than is necessary? This requires that there be something that is more important than reducing suffering; such that the increased suffering optimises better for this other something. I do think that this something that is more important exists, and I think that it is free will. Free will implies the freedom to cause unnecessary suffering in others; and some people do this. War, for example, is a direct consequence of the free will of military leaders and politicians.
I don't see that as necessarily a statement of lukewarm belief. I just didn't couch it in impressive-sounding terms.
What about suffering which is not caused by humans ? For example, consider earthquakes, floods, volcano eruptions, asteroid impacts, plague outbreaks, and the like. To use a lighter example, do we really need as many cases of the common cold as we are currently experiencing all over the world ?
The common answer to this question is something along the lines of "God moves in mysterious ways" -- which does make sense once you posit such a God -- but you said that "the optimal amount of suffering is a good deal less than we see", so perhaps you have a different answer ?
What makes suffering any harder a problem than death? Surely the same strategy works equally well in both cases.
More precisely... the "solution of the afterlife" is to posit an imperceptible condition that makes the apparent bad thing not so bad after all, despite the evidence we can observe. On that account, sure, it seems like we die, but really (we posit) only our bodies die and there's this other non-body thing, the soul, which is what really matters which isn't affected by that.
Applied to suffering, the same solution is something like "sure, it seems like we suffer, but really only our minds suffer and there's this other non-mind thing, the soul, which is what really matters and which isn't affected by that."
Personally, I find both of these solutions unconvincing to the point of inanity, but if the former is compelling, I see no reason to not consider the latter equally so. If my soul is unaffected by death, surely it is equally unaffected by (e.g.) a broken arm?
I don't think that the soul is entirely unaffected by death. I just think that it continues to exist afterwards. Death can still be a fairly traumatic experience, depending on how one dies; there's a difference between dying quietly in my sleep, and dying screaming and terrified.
This, in effect, reduces the problem of death to the problem of suffering; it may be unpleasant, but afterwards there's still a 'me' around to recover.
Of course, there's the question of what goes into a soul; what it is that the soul consists of, and retains. I'm not sure; but I imagine that it includes some elements of personality, and probably some parts of memory. Since personality and memory can be affected by e.g. a broken arm, I therefore conclude that the soul can be affected by e.g. a broken arm.
Absolutely agreed: if I assume that I have a soul and a body, that what happens to my soul is important and what happens to my body is unimportant, and that my soul suffers when I suffer but does not die when I die, then what follows from those assumptions is that suffering is important but dying isn't.
And if I instead assume that I have a soul and a body, that what happens to my soul is important and what happens to my body is unimportant, and that my soul does not suffer when I suffer and does not die when I die, then what follows from those assumptions is that neither suffering nor dying is important.
If assuming the former solves the problem of death, then assuming the latter solves both the problem of death and the problem of suffering.
I understand that you assume the former but not the latter, and therefore consider the problem of death solved but the problem of suffering open.
What I'm asking you is: why not make different assumptions, and thereby solve both?
I mean, if you were deriving the specific properties of the soul from your observations, and your observations were consistent with the first theory but not the second, that would make sense to me... but as far as I've understood you aren't doing that, so what makes one set of assumptions preferable to another?
You know, like CCC, I'm not sure what I would expect a world truly beyond the reach of God to look like - but I really doubt it would look like reality; even if God does not exist. I lack both the knowledge and, I suspect, the capacity to deduce arbitrary features of reality a priori. If our world is exactly what Dawkins would expect from a world without God, why isn't he able to deduce features that haven't been corroborated yet and make original discoveries based on this knowledge?
(On the other hand, I note that Dawkins also endorses the theory that our physical laws are as a result of natural selection among black holes, does he not? So that could be a prediction, I guess, since it "explains" our laws of physics and so on.)
Just so I'm clear: if I observe an aspect of my environment which the prevailing religious establishment in my community explains the existence of by positing that God took certain actions, and I'm not confident God in fact took those actions (perhaps because I've seen no evidence to differentially support the hypothesis that He did so) so I look for an alternative explanation, and I find evidence differentially supporting a hypothesis that does not require the existence of God at all, and as a consequence of that I am able to make certain predictions about the world which turn out to be corroborated by later observations, what am I entitled (on your account) to infer from that sequence of events?
That the prevailing religious establishment was wrong, somehow. In what way they were wrong depends on the details.
OK, thanks for clarifying.
Because all of the deductions one can get from it have already been made, and amply confirmed. The basic idea that nature can be understood, if we look carefully enough and avoid resorting to the supernatural, has been enormously successful over the last few centuries. Awe at the mystery of God has not.
Even when a scientist is motivated by a religious urge to understand God's creation, he leaves ideas of divine intervention behind when he walks into the laboratory.
Funny how they were all made before anyone suggested they were deducible from atheism.
... was originally predicted as a result of a rational Creator, not the lack of one. Arguably it was the wrong deduction given the premise, but still.
Let me repeat myself.
If a hypothesis actually gave enough information to deduce our current model of the universe plus or minus how uncertain we are about it, what are the odds it wouldn't reveal more?
If an atheist from any period up to the present could have gained information not already discovered (but that we now know, of course) why does this effect mysteriously vanish when we move from a hypothetical past atheist to actual current atheists living in the modern world?
This reminds me of people who claim that they rationally evaluated everything they grew up being taught, and lo and behold they were right about everything already, despite having believed it for arational reasons.
Other way around, I would think. References? Everyone was a theist back in the days of Roger Bacon, they had to be. So did anyone decide, "God is rational", and then deduce "we can attain all manner of powers if we just investigate how things work"? Or was it a case of discovering the effectiveness of empirical investigation, then deducing the rationality of God -- either from genuine faith or just as a way of avoiding charges of heresy?
Because, as I said, it's been done, mined out before open atheism was even a thing. "There is no God" has precious little implication beyond "this is not a benevolent universe and it's up to us to figure everything out and save ourselves." In contrast, "There is a God (of the Christian/Jewish/Muslim type)" leads to the false prediction that the universe is benevolent, rescued by postulating hidden or mysterious benevolence. The theist can take their pick of it being understandable ("the rational works of a rational God") or not ("mysterious ways"), although the former is in some conflict with the postulate of benevolence passing human understanding.
As far as I can tell, most arguments of this kind hinge on that "slight evidence for the existence of God" that you mentioned. Presumably, this is the evidence that overcomes your low prior of God's existence, thus causing you to believe that God is more likely to exist than not.
Since the evidence is anecdotal and difficult (if not impossible) to communicate, this means we can't have any kind of a meaningful debate, but I'm personally ok with that.
Actually, I gave God's existence a fairly high prior from the start. The slight evidence merely reinforced that.
And yes, we can't really have a meaningful debate over it.
Why the high prior, out of curiosity ?
My parents are intelligent and thoughtful people. Anything that they agree is correct, gets a high prior by default. In general, that rule serves me well.
There are many other intelligent and thoughtful people who disagree. Why -- epistemically, not historically -- do you place particular weight on your parents' beliefs? How did they come by those beliefs?
Fair enough, that does make sense.